----------
>
> >If the
> >US gov't were to take an honest position as a fiduciary of the people,
many
> >of the patents presently held by these companies would belong to the
people
> >of the US.
> I wrote a letter to the editor once, back when Clinton seemed to have a
> spine, after he had proposed requiring the pharmaceutical companies to
> sell child immunizations to the government at govt-set prices so that all
> children could get vaccinated. Our paper thundered that this interfered
> with the "free market." I pointed out that there is no "free market" in
> most drugs, because they are all patented, making them legal monopolies,
> and that society grants these legal monopolies expecting benefits in
> return, which in this case, evidently, the pharm companies were not
> providing. All Clinton was proposing was countering a monopoly with a
> monopsony (the buyer equivalent of what a monopoly is to a seller). Sauce
> for the goose and all that. They never printed the letter. Probably
> couldn't understand it.
>
My earlier post wasn't clearly written; I apologize.

What I wanted to say was that in many cases, taxpayers fund the r&d
process, whether directly or by tax benefit. Also, gov't contracts
guarantee an income stream, making some otherwise speculative endeavors
less so. Finally, in many cases, we end up guinea pigs (particularly in the
field of medicine). At the end of this process, someone else gets a
proprietary interest in the product.

NASA always boasts about the spinoff technologies from space exploration.
What is our equity position in these tecnologies? Didn't we pay for their
development? Didn't we guarantee a market for them? Didn't we live (or
should I say, don't we live) with the risks of them (the Cassini project
comes to mind...)? Does this risk assumption differ so much from that of
the corporate employer that the distribution of benefits should differ so?

That is the idea I meant to get across.

- Don DeBar